Hi all! I have this terrible problem with my disk... Here's what happened. I made a motherboard change, so I installed windows again in a new partition (I have a 80gb sata). Everything went fine, on the booting screen I could choose from the previous windows and the new one. So after I installed everything on the new windows and moved my most important files to it from the other partition, I went and formated the old partition with the old windows cause I wasn't gonna need it anymore. Well, I tried normal windows formating, but it didn't work. So I used a program called partition magic 8.0 to format it. When I was gonna do it, the program told me "After this action you won't have any active partition, make sure you activate one after the process is complete" or something like that. So I said ok, I'll format it and then I'll activate the other partition. The thing is, after the format, I wanted to activate the new partition but the option in the menu was grayed out and I simply couldn't do it. After lot's of trying, I needed to sleep so I just turned the computer off... Well, my disk doesn't boot anymore. Damn partition magic! Why does it tell me to do something it can't do. Anyway, I made a boot disk and all and tried to activate the partition with fdisk and partion magic's bot disk, but even though they let me activate it it doesn't work. So I said hell with it, I'll install windows again. But now I can't even install windows! window's installer says that "this partition is not compatible with windows XP", and even after I delete a partition and create a new one with the installer, it keeps saying the same thing when I'm gonna install! what can i do? How can I activate a partition? Or at least how can I make a fresh partition that let's me install windows again? thanks in advance david Free

You should have set the partition active in Partition Magic. If you have made the rescue disks you can use it to start Partition Magic.

"You should have set the partition active in Partition Magic. If you have made the rescue disks you can use it to start Partition Magic." thanks for the response... but what I explained is that I COULDN'T set it active because it was grayed out. And as I said too, I already made that rescue disk and started partition magic from it, and even though I set the partition active it doesn't work. :S you didn't read my post very well did you? anyway I understand cause it's quite long Free

Download and run DelPart. It will delete all the partitioning on the drive. Make sure you select the c: drive. Then try the install again and let it partition and format the drive. http://www.russelltexas.com/delpart... Also be very careful and read the screens carefully when doing the install. It's easy to miss something and install ends up trying to install on the wrong drive. Been there done that! And yes, it's best to keep posts concise and to the point. It's easy to overlook and/or forget something in a long rambling post.

I don't know why you installed Windows a 2nd time? All you had to do after the board change was a "repair install" of XP. Or if you would have prepared the HDD prior to swapping the board, you *probably* wouldn't have had to do anything other than install the drivers for your new board. In effect, what you did was create a dual boot with XP/XP & all the boot info was contained in the 1st partition. Once you shutdown the system for the nite, you lost the ability to bootup because the boot info was wiped & the 2nd partition was never made active. And depending on how you did it, it may not be able to be made active. http://www.microsoft.com/resources/... If you follow aegis' suggestion & use DelPart, you will lose everything.

"Download and run DelPart. It will delete all the partitioning on the drive." Thanks Jam. that was poorly stated. But DelPart lets you select the partition(s) to delete. Hopefully Fennerman will select the correct one(s).

I did try to use the same windows, but I had lots of problems like windows detecting 12 IDE drives and such. Then, I tried to do a repair install, but it would always freeze when 34 minutes of installation where remaining. That's why I decided to install windows in the other partition... Well, thanks everybody for the info, I guess I won't be able to make my partition active, cause I already tried with fdisk and partition magic... The best thing to do would be get my disk over a friends house and backup the data and format it from there... I don't think delpart will work cause windows installer can't delete a partition properly, and besides I don't have a floppy drive right now... I had borrowed it for fdisk and PM. Anyway thanks all. I had hoped for a way to activate it but it seems there isn't. :( poor me, 2 weeks and I still can't start overclocking my e4300 Thank you!